Hi everyone! Awhile back my brother Nick and I ran a Kickstarter for our new rpg The Magical land of Yeld. It was a success, and we worked hard to finish the game up and make it the best we could. And its a real monster of a book! 260+ pages, hundreds of full color illustrations and comics, a cool setting and neat monsters! But we underestimated how long the project would take to finish and how much it would cost to ship, and by the time we got the books back from the printer we had run out of money and couldn’t mail them to our backers!

Since then Nick and i have been scrambling to make up the money we need, working extra hours, taking on extra jobs, selling personal belongings. and we’ve been shipping books to backers as we can afford to. Since we already had an expansion for Yeld nearly ready to go we decided to offer it through a Gofundme campaign and put all the money for it toward our shipping expenses. We could use your help and support!

The expansion is called Towns & Territories, and its all about fund adventures with the Townsfolk of Yeld. You can set up a Hero House in a local town and help the townsfolk with their problems, like putting on a small play, rescuing the mayor, chasing off rude ghosts or working with a local inventor! These tiny adventures build your reputation as local heros and allow you to unlock special bonuses that you can only use in town. Like crafting magic potions to sell to fancy snakes, or working with the local sword master to hone your skills.

If you want to be a jerk you can instead hook up with the local Crimson Ministry thugs and carry out their illegal jobs to become a notorious outlaw. You can fight the local town guards, rack up warrants, spend your nights on the town and sleep the days away in your Secret Hideout! Being an outlaw is a lot of fun… until the Warrant Mages get you!

Towns & Territories is a 30 page digital expansion for The Magical Land of Yeld rpg. You can get it through our Gofundme fundraiser right now, and all the money from that will go to shipping books to patient Kickstarter backers!

The Magical Land of Yeld RPG is also available for sale as a PDF from DrivethruRPG and the Modest Medusa store. Look for the physical book early next year.

Probably the best Twitter account I came across in the past year or two is that of Rabbi Danya Guttenberg (https://twitter.com/TheRaDR). She writes succinctly and clearly on "the messy business of being a person in the world".

Sharon Shinn/ Molly Ostertag: Shattered Warrior is a good SF comic about a human resistance in a dystopian world ruled and exploited by a militaristic alien race. It is tightly woven, has a lot of (inter-)personal drama, some romance, and it probably is in the YA genre (I seriously have no idea and am not really interested in genre boundaries). I became aware of the book because I'm a fan of the artist, Molly Ostertag (I recommend both her graphic novel Witch Boy as well as the webcomic she's drawing, Strong Female Protagonist).I particularly liked that some scenes were done without any words. I have a soft spot for "silent" comics.

Yesterday I finished Thanos Rising, a mini-series by Jason Aaron and Simone Bianchi. I had expected better stuff by Jason Aaron, after his female Thor (I still want to read his other Thor stuff) and Star Wars. Thanos Rising suffers because Thanos is the only character with an inner life. All the others remain flat and boring. This is particularly blatant for the female lead, which plays an important part but remains utterly, ridiculously unmotivated.Also, I'm a bit over this Dark & Brooding & Selfrighteous Loner Whom Nobody Understands Nor Loves. That trope is not enough to carry a story.

I finished N.K.Jemisin's The Fifth Season a few days ago. Wow, what a great book! (It won a Hugo award, so the world already knows this.) Jemisin interweaves three storylines set at different times and places, each helping you better understand bit by bit how the world works, how unfair it is, and why it should end. For the last time. The book has absolutely fantastic worldbuilding, nice pacing, and a bunch of setting-appropriate emphatic curses.The whole book is like a very slow moving tsunami, and only near the end do you get to see the larger picture (but not even the whole picture yet, it seems).

"The Fifth Season" is the first book in the "Broken Earth" series, so I'm happy there's more. Highly recommended unless you prefer having every question answered within a single book.

Jonas Richter: (And I have no idea if anybody can see this without subscribing to this collection... so, uh, maybe let me know if you read this? I'm curious.)

Does anybody know who was the designer of this mini-system usually referred to as "Roll For Shoes"? The user who posted it in 2010 on the Story Games forum (DWeird) seems to imply it was created by someone named Ben, and first run on #playnow (an IRC channel?)... +Ben Lehman?